Mr. Fox Read online

  I coughed out an “Ouch, do you mind?” and hoped the apple seller wasn’t looking. The woman’s grip was surprisingly strong. She wore a brown skirt suit and a tiny brown hat tipped coquettishly over one eye.

  “Let go of me,” I said.

  When she didn’t, I pleaded, “I’m meeting someone.”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business—”

  She shook me a little. “Mr. Fox’s secretary,” I said. “I’m meeting Mr. Fox’s secretary.”

  “Then it’s just as well, isn’t it, that I’m her.”

  She released me at last, and we stood nose to nose. I glared, and she just looked back with an air of melancholy.

  “You’d better prove it,” I said. For some reason, I’d thought the secretary would be a man.

  “You’re . . . Mary Foxe?” she said, looking me over.

  “I’m Mary Foxe,” I said.

  The woman produced an envelope from her handbag, pulled my letter out of it, and showed me.

  Abominable Mr. Fox,

  I read, then winced, and returned it to her, apologizing. She said: “Don’t apologise; I think it’s funny.” But she didn’t laugh, or even smile.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she said.

  I handed her the black folder full of stories, and I asked her what Mr. Fox was like.

  The secretary blinked slowly, thinking. “He’s kind of quiet,” she said.

  She wandered away with the folder sticking out of her handbag, leaving me alone on the sidewalk. I watched her, thinking she might suddenly remember something and turn around. Once I was sure that she’d gone, I hailed a cab.

  A week went by; he didn’t write to me. He had my folder and he didn’t write to me. Then three more silent weeks, six, eight. My fingernails crept down into their beds, my eyes grew glassy, I brushed my hair with my back to the mirror. I had no interest in looking at myself; it was the sensation of teeth against my scalp that subdued me.

  It was all I could do not to write to him again.

  “You should go get your stories back,” Katherine said, when I briefly explained the situation to her. “He’s probably going to steal them or something.”

  “How would you know they’re good enough for him to want to steal them?”

  “Oh, I know,” Katherine said sagely. “I read ’em. All of them. I especially like the one about the disappearing zoo. That’s the best one.”

  I grabbed her before she could escape and, unexpectedly, found myself hugging her. I liked the fluffy weight of her head against my chest. She was just as surprised as I was. I neutralised it by calling her a bloody nosey parker.

  “Maybe that goddamn secretary stole the stories,” Katherine suggested.

  “I told you not to say that word.”

  “Which? Secretary? Stories? Maybe . . . ?”

  Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  One morning Mitzi said I ought to take a break. That was alarming. I stopped buttering my toast and said, “Why? I’m fine. Thanks all the same, Mrs. Cole, but the weekends are enough for me.” I made a swift analysis of my behaviour of the past two weeks or so. I had not said or done anything particularly strange; I had behaved more or less as I always did.

  Mitzi rose from her seat and cupped my face in her flower-scented hands. I was so nervous I could have bitten her. “Honey, no one’s saying you’re not doing a good job. You’re doing a wonderful job. Isn’t she, Katy?”

  Katherine said yes and stuck her tongue out at me.

  “It’s just that you can’t give your weekends to a soup kitchen and your weekdays to this little fiend of mine and just go on and on without stopping. What if you burned out or something? Honey—I’m telling you, I’d never forgive myself.” She had a new bracelet on, stacked with emeralds brighter than her eyes. I hate rich people.

  “Your face is all pinched,” Katherine told me helpfully.

  So that morning, instead of taking Katherine to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I went to get my stories back.

  One hundred and seventy-seven West 77th Street was easy to find. It was a posh apartment block, much like the Coles’ but smaller. More exclusive, I suppose. I entered the building behind a grocery delivery boy who pulled a small township of brown paper bags along on a trolley behind him. The building directory indicated that Mr. Fox, at number 25, was on the fourth floor. As I waited by the lift I caught sight of myself in the polished steel doors. I was grinning. On the fourth floor I approached number 25 casually, as if I might not stop, as if I might well walk past it and continue on down the red carpeted corridor. But I did stop at 25. And I rang the doorbell, and I knocked, hard.

  The secretary answered the door. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick or powder, and she’d yanked her hair up into a knot on the top of her head. She had a pencil behind each ear and one in her hand. She looked very, very young.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked. She didn’t appear to recognise me.

  “My name’s Mary Foxe,” I said.

  “Mary Foxe,” she said, as if repeating the name would help jog her memory.

  “I corresponded with Mr. Fox about some stories of mine. He said he’d read them, but I suppose he’s too busy. I’ve come to take them off his hands.”

  She hesitated. Oh, God. She’d thrown my stories away. Or there was a mountain of manuscripts somewhere behind her, and she’d never find mine.

  “I met you outside Salmagundi on Sixty-first and Lexington a couple of months ago,” I said. “There was a bit of a fuss with some revolving doors.”

  Her eyes lit up at last. “Oh, right,” she said. “Right.”

  She looked over her shoulder, though no one had spoken. “Be right back.”

  She closed the door before I could peer into the flat. It seemed strange to me that Mr. Fox’s secretary should be at his flat—I mean, secretaries belong in offices.

  Ten minutes later she opened the door again and handed me my folder. I looked through it quickly—all the stories appeared to be there. The pages were well thumbed, and some parts were underlined.

  “He—er—he read them?”

  Suddenly I felt as if I could knock this woman down and charge into his study, pull up a chair, and settle down to talk. As if she knew what I was thinking, she took a firmer stance in the doorway. She twirled her pencil between her slim fingers. “Yes. He did.”

  I didn’t like the look in her eyes. My throat went dry. “And?”

  She shook her head. “You don’t really want to write. . . . What you want is love. Go find yourself a beau. You’re so young, Miss Foxe. Go have a little fun.”

  “Did Mr. Fox say that? Or is this coming from you?”

  She looked down.

  “It’s coming from me,” she told the floor.

  “I want to talk to Mr. Fox,” I said.

  I stepped towards the secretary, and she held her pencil out at eye level, in an unmistakably threatening gesture. The point was very sharp.

  “What did Mr. Fox say?” I said. “Just tell me that and I’ll go.”

  She didn’t answer, and I said, “Are you Mr. Fox?”

  She laughed. “No.”

  “You are, aren’t you? You’re Mr. Fox—” I caught sight of a bare passageway, a telephone on a stand, the receiver off the hook—I heard no dial tone. “You’re him.”

  She frowned. “I’m not.”

  “What did he say, then?”

  “Wait.”

  The door closed again. When it opened, the secretary was holding a lit taper. The flame cast her eyes into shadow.

  “He said . . .” She paused, and sighed. “He said I should do this.”

  She touched the taper to the black folder, and it caught fire. She blew the taper out before the flame struck her fingers. But I didn’t let the folder go. The leather cover burned with a harsh sound like someone trying to hold back a cry between their teeth. Still I held the folder. I felt the skin
on my fingers shrink. I watched words turn amber and float away.

  I liked these stories. Katherine liked them. I’d worked hard on them.

  There was so much smoke in my eyes.

  But I held on.

  Mary Foxe had known that it was more than a matter of snapping her fingers and having Mr. Fox change his ways—she’d known it would be difficult, but this was beyond all her expectations. She’d been asleep for days, in a four-poster bed in a dark blue room. There wasn’t a part of her body that didn’t ache. Her brain ached most of all. She’d felt terrible burning his stories, which she’d actually thought were rather good. She couldn’t have let Mr. Fox get away with beheading her, though. That was exactly the kind of behaviour she had set out to discourage. She was aware of a large clock ticking outside the bedroom door, but it didn’t wake her up. Mary was busy having a very long dream.

  In her dream, she was a spinster. Fastidious, polite, and thirty-eight years old. Her features were plain and unremarkable—they had always been plain and unremarkable. She had been a dutiful daughter when her parents were alive, and now Dream-Mary lived in the attic of the house her parents had left her. The remainder of the house she had hoped to let to a family—but no family liked the idea of living there with her up in the attic like that. So Mary let the house below to a solicitor named Pizarsky. He was out all day—that was good. He was punctual with his rent—also good. In the evenings, however, he hosted parties that were exclusively attended by attractive young ladies who giggled for hours on end. That was tiresome.

  Mary and Mr. Pizarsky kept their exchanges as brief as possible.

  “Morning, Miss F.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Pizarsky.”

  “Here’s the rent, Miss F.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Pizarsky.”

  “Off home for Christmas now, Miss F.”

  “Merry Christmas, Mr. Pizarsky.”

  On Valentine’s Day, Dream-Mary bought herself a single red rose, then immediately ran back into the shop, confused and embarrassed, to return it.

  Most days Dream-Mary stayed at her desk until sunset, working in the special quiet of the otherwise empty house, the settling of floorboards and the ticking of clocks. She wrote romance novels under the pen name Wendy Darling. Hers were gloriously improbable tales, stuffed with happy coincidences, eternal devotion, and the unwavering recognition of inner beauty. They were in great demand, Mary’s novels. They were read-them-once-and-throw-them-away sort of books, really. And Mary had seen people doing just that, throwing her novels away, or very deliberately leaving them behind on park benches and bus seats once they had finished. She tried not to let it get her down. She didn’t like to brood. She kept a framed photograph of her parents on her desk, to remind herself of their story, which amazed her. They had fallen in love and kept it up far into old age; that was all. Her father was the hero in every story she wrote, and her mother was the heroine. They had been gone five years, but she brought them together again and again, thirty-five lines of cream-coloured foolscap folio at a time. And they never tired of finding each other, even when she was reduced, in the final chapters, to typing with just one finger, her little finger, jabbing out words until her hand curled up and could do no more. She completed a novel every other month and took August and December off.

  It was Dream-Mary’s custom to read the local newspaper as she ate her evening meal in the dining corner of her attic. She read it thoroughly, without omitting a single paragraph or page. It was much more difficult to be alarmed by the events of a day that was almost over. After that she would go for a walk, to keep fit. And upon her return to her attic she would say a few phrases aloud, experimenting with a friendly tone of voice. She didn’t often socialise, but it was important to keep her hand in. She rehearsed small talk about the weather, and about children and the cost of living. From Mr. Pizarsky’s party below, a gramophone puffed jazz up at her like smoke rings until she stopped trying. She put on her nightgown, did her stretching exercises, applied cold cream to her face, and went to bed. Her days were pleasant and her mood was even.

  One evening Mary went for her after-dinner walk as usual. She went through town, passing the tidy shop fronts, their signs beautifully lettered in glossy paint and print, striding over the mushy bank of sawdust outside the butcher’s. The entire neighbourhood was at home; wireless sets buzzed gently at her as she passed. Each house stood in its own square of garden, each garden with its own picket fence and its own garden gate. Not a curtain twitched. Mary climbed Murder Hill. It was a funny old hill. It started off as easily as walking on flat ground, and continued to seem flat, even after she had begun to feel short of breath. She looked down at all the chimney tops and picked lavender.

  When she returned from her walk she found the house suspiciously quiet.

  There was no rustling or giggling, no chiming of glassware to be heard anywhere in the house, she noticed. No party this evening. Mr. Pizarsky appeared, carrying a cake. It prickled with lit candles; at first glance there appeared to be hundreds of them. “Happy birthday, Miss Foxe,” he said, smiling warily.

  He was right. It was her birthday. Dream-Mary thought she might be sick. “Mr. Pizarsky,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.” It was meant to sound light-hearted, but it didn’t.

  He looked crestfallen. “You don’t like cake.”

  “No, I do. How did you know it was my birthday?”

  In the kitchen, Mr. Pizarsky carefully dropped his burden onto the table. He stared at the candle flames. They both did. It seemed rude to look at each other just then.

  “I gave my room a good spring cleaning last week,” he said. “I found a birthday card. Dated.”

  So he slept in her old room. She hadn’t known that, hadn’t checked to see whether or not he’d been keeping the lower half of the house in order, whether he had changed any aspect of the furnishing. The hallway and main stairs were tidy enough, and as long as the house didn’t fall down she didn’t care. In the last few weeks of her mother’s illness they’d spent whole afternoons in that room. Afterwards she’d moved out of that part of the house in a hurry. And she hadn’t gone back for anything since, had waited in the parlour while prospective tenants looked the property over. She must have left a great many things in there.

  “I’ve taken a liberty, haven’t I?” Mr. Pizarsky gestured towards the birthday cake. “Even as I bought it, I wasn’t sure. You like to have secret birthdays? You English . . . I am forever offending you.”

  “No, no—” Mary searched for her manners and caught hold of them again. “It’s a lovely surprise.”

  She pretended to make a wish and blew out the candles—only thirty of them, she counted. Such flattery. She found two small plates and put a slice of the cake on each, then remained standing, holding her slice away from her. He stood, too—he couldn’t very well sit down and eat while she stood there, not eating. As they exchanged remarks she was aware of treating him shabbily.

  “I hope you didn’t cancel a gathering on my account, Mr. Pizarsky.”

  “No, I’ve been abandoned tonight.”

  Mr. Pizarsky was unkempt for a man of the law—his hair wanted combing, and the elbows of his jacket could have done with a thorough darning.

  “I’m sure they’ll come back,” Mary soothed.

  “I hope she will. That is to say—to tell you the truth, Miss Foxe, there is only one of them I particularly care for. The others are just her friends.”

  She hadn’t taken a proper look at any of the girls that crowded the downstairs rooms most evenings; they all looked exactly the same to her.

  “Well—best of luck, Mr. Pizarsky. Is your name Russian?”

  “I’m a Pole, Miss F. . . . though I have met Russians who bear the name. Have you ever been to my country?”

  “Poland? No—no. I haven’t been anywhere. Brighton. The Lake District and the Cotswolds, a few times. London sometimes.”

  “A pity. Mine is a lovely country, in parts—simple and honest and str
ong. The landscapes, the buildings, the mead.”

  “Oh—I must go there one day.”

  He smiled sadly, with his mouth closed.

  “One day. Not now. The rioting. And more to come.”

  “Really . . . ?”

  Her question was feeble, but he considered it with a quizzical twist of his mouth.

  “Why, yes, of course! ‘Really,’ you say. You don’t think riots are so bad. Are you thinking of them as you do the weather here? A nuisance, but it’s not so difficult to get on with things despite them?” He described the three riots he had witnessed firsthand, in three different cities. He made the anger of the poor and put-upon sound like a storm on the ground; it scorched buildings when it woke, its first touch killed. “That is why I am here,” he finished. “Otherwise, pork pies and jellied eels be damned; give me my country.”

  Mary suspected her father would have especially liked this man.

  “Are you—forgive me, I know nothing about solicitors—but is it quite usual to find solicitors like you, Mr. Pizarsky?”

  She had delighted him. “Let me see . . . Perhaps not. I was a poet.”

  “Oh, a poet . . . but what’s that?” Wishy-washy, that was how she found most poetry—it just missed the point over and over again.

  “What’s that,” he agreed, laughing. “What’s that. . . .”

  He took her plate from her hand. “And now I will release you, even though you are unfair and have told me nothing in exchange.”